Three things from this week.
First. I was driving the other day with a Christian radio station on and heard a line that stuck with me: “not everything hard we go through is punishment. Sometimes it's preparation.”
I've been thinking about that line all week.
When you're in the middle of something hard, the instinct is to ask what you did to deserve it. What went wrong. Who's to blame, and is it me? That's where my head goes anyway…
Some of the hardest stretches I've been through are the reason I can do what I do now. The setbacks got me here. I didn't want any of it while it was happening. I'd have skipped all of it if you'd offered me the option in the moment.
Romans 5:3-4 puts it plainly: "Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope."
It's a chain. Suffering runs into perseverance, perseverance into character, character into hope. What the hard stretch builds in you is the whole point.
Some things are just hard and carry no clean, nor immediately visible purpose, and I won't pretend otherwise. But when I'm in it, "what is this preparing me for?" gets me a lot further than "what did I do wrong?"
Second. Two large Excel exports this week from two systems that don't talk to each other. Different formats, different column names, tens of thousands of rows. I needed to find where they overlapped and where they didn't.
That used to eat my whole afternoon. VLOOKUPs, cleaning up those pesky trailing spaces, finding out halfway through that one system stores names as "Last, First" and the other as "First Last." Then doing it again because I blew a range.
I handed both files to Claude. Twenty minutes, most of which was me checking its work.
Here's roughly the prompt I used, cleaned up so you can copy it:
I'm attaching two spreadsheets exported from two different systems. They contain overlapping records but the formats don't match.
Before you do anything, show me the column headers and three sample rows from each file, and tell me which columns you think are the match keys.
Then:
Normalize the match key on both sides. Strip whitespace, standardize casing, handle name format differences, strip formatting from IDs and phone numbers.
Give me three tabs: records in both files, records only in File A, records only in File B.
Add a "match confidence" column and flag anything you matched on a fuzzy basis so I can review it myself.
Tell me how many rows you couldn't match at all and why.
Don't guess on ambiguous matches. Put them in a separate review tab.
Two things matter here. Make it show you its assumptions before it starts, because the whole thing falls apart if it picks the wrong match key. And make it separate out the fuzzy matches, because you want to eyeball those yourself.
One more thing. Strip client names and anything financial before you upload. I renamed columns to generic labels and swapped the identifying fields for internal reference numbers first. Five minutes, and I can rest easy knowing I sanitized it of any sensitive information.
Last one. One week of coaching two baseball teams down. It's going great, and I was wrong about where the work is.
The actual in-person events are the easy (and fun) parts. The work is everything around them. The practice plan you redo at 9pm…or the one my dog took a bite out of on her way to giving me a hug, and is still chewing on as I write this…The text threads. The equipment you need to pickup in the middle of the week for the second time because the first time no one showed up. None of it is difficult, but all of it adds up, and it lands in the gaps in your week where you planned to do something else.
Which is what I tell founders about their businesses, so I should have seen it coming. 🙂 The work that eats you is typically the work nobody named.
Then Tuesday night after practice, my son walked up and hugged me, unprompted, and thanked me for coaching his team. Nothing else attached to it. That's the whole return on investment and it clears the ledger by a mile.
Ask me again in October.
Oh, and last week I asked what you use to keep the family calendar straight. Still interested. Hit reply.
That's what I've got.
Max